Who Get's To Be A Child?- With Emily Clark, M.Ed.

In this episode of Children Deserve Better, Dr. Jasmine Moses sits down with Emily Clark, M.Ed.—researcher, early childhood advocate, and founder of EarlyEdEM.com—to unpack the idea that childhood is not as universal as we often believe. 

Together, they explore how systems like racism, poverty, policing, and flawed education policies deny many children the right to a full and free childhood. From adultification to inequities in universal pre-K, this conversation challenges listeners to reimagine childhood as a right—not a privilege—and offers practical ways adults can begin shifting their practices to center children's rights, agency, and joy.

A Few Highlights That Are Explored In This Episode: 

•  Why childhood isn't universal—and never has been

• How race, class, and policy shape who gets to “just be a kid”
  
  
  
• The adultification of Black and Brown children
  
  
  
• The myth of universal pre-K and the need for reparation-based funding
  
  
  
• The vital importance of play as a human right
  
  

 You’ll walk away with critical reflections and tangible ways to fight for a world where all children are protected, nurtured, and free.

🔗 Connect with Dr. Jasmine:

• 💻 Website:www.equtyinbloom.com
  
  
  
• 📸 Instagram: @theantibiasece
  
  

🌱 Follow Emily Clark

• 🔗 Website: www.earlyedem.com
  
  
  
• 📸 Instagram: @earlyedem
  
  
  
• 🎤 Catch Emily presenting at the Association for Early Learning Leaders (April) and Zero to Three’s Annual Conference (October)

Transcript

Jasmine Moses (00:00)

Hello everyone and thank you so much for tuning in to Children Deserve Better. My name is Dr. Jasmine Moses. I am your host And before I get into introducing who is going to chat with us today on the podcast, I just want to kind of set the tone for some of the things that we're going to talk about. today we are going to be getting into childhood and how it's actually not universal for everyone. We talk a

about childhood like it's guaranteed. Like every child gets to grow up safe and playful and protected but the truth is childhood isn't universal as much as we would like to think that it is. Some children are forced to grow up too fast. Some are treated as more of a problem than an actual child we know that some are being denied some of their most basic needs and

care, safety, joy, and room to just be a child. Children are our most vulnerable population and still as a society we do a very poor job unfortunately of protecting them and their childhoods. across the globe we know this to be true, children are caught in the middle of war, they're caught in the middle of genocide, violence, and this spans through communities for generations.

even in our own neighborhoods right here systems like racism or poverty or policing and immigration policy strip children of their right to a full and free childhood. We can see this happening even in our schools we know that black and brown children are labeled as older, less innocent,

They're punished harder, they're watched more closely, and given fewer chances to make mistakes. even if we wanted to focus on something that we think is universal for children, the idea of play, play is one of the first things that's taken away from children recesses get cut. Playgrounds are designed to push certain children out and of course poor and working-class children are supposed to be seen as more mature to act responsibly. we could talk all day about how this is showing up but I wanted you to understand, and what I want you to take away as we talk today on the podcast is that childhood should be a right and not a privilege. And so that means that we cannot just hope that children get to be children, but...

we as their adults have to fight for the world where every child is protected, nurtured, and free. with all that being said, today I am talking to the lovely Emily Clark, who has been doing incredible work in the space of children's rights. And I'm just going to read her amazing bio here, and then I'm going to give her a chance to introduce herself. So Emily Clark, M.Ed, is a doctoral student and a graduate research assistant at the

Early Childhood Education Lab at Drexel University. She has more than 15 years of experience teaching and leading in early childhood, both in the US and internationally. And Emily's research agenda focuses on critically examining quality in early childhood education and connecting quality with equity driven rights centered humanizing care. Emily is the founder of EarlyEdEM.com, a global mission to bridge the gap between research

practice for early childhood practitioners. So we are going to dig into all of this that we just talked about and I'm so excited to welcome Emily on the show today. So who are you Emily and how does your work connect to building a better world for children?

Em (03:31)

Thank you so much for having me, Jasmine. I'm so excited to be here and to get to chat with you. I think that intro probably said it all. I don't think I can say anything about myself better than that. I sound very fancy. Yeah, my work is really about giving everyone the sort of permission to ask for more in early childhood. I really want...

Jasmine Moses (03:34)
Thanks for being here.

You

Em (03:59)
you know, our children to be able to ask for more in ECE settings. I want our teachers to be able to ask for more. I want our communities to be able to ask for more because we know how important ECE is and we know that quality.

in ECE, true quality is really transformative. So how do we raise that bar while also providing the support that everyone needs to really get there? And those are, you know, big questions. If you know me, you know I always like to think about the big questions that aren't easily solvable, but they're the most important. So yeah.

Jasmine Moses (04:32)
well thank you so much and I am super excited to dive into this topic. if you are not following Emily on her social medias, now's a good time, but I'll say that again at the end. And I'll dive into this next question. we talk a lot about childhood as if it is universal, but we know that...

Unfortunately, that that's not true. So in your work, how do you see race, class, and policy shaping which children get to be seen as children and which ones don't?

Em (05:03)
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack sort of when we think about childhood because we have very culturally shaped definitions of what childhood should be, what it should look like and who it's for. And those very much depend on who you are and where you're from and what that's looked like for you. So yeah, this idea of universal childhood is often what we call like a Eurocentric or white Western version of childhood.

Jasmine Moses (05:10)
Mmm.

Em (05:29)
And that's really shifted and developed over time. Like in the Victorian era, know, the universal childhood was more children working. So it's shifted now to a very sort of white middle-class heteronormative version of children being able to play and to express themselves and to have that freedom.

which is wonderful, but we know that not all children get that. And we also know that for not all families does that work. So in some families, what, you know, a healthy childhood looks like is really more like almost an apprenticeship model. You know, if you think of more like a Montessori model where children are doing the real work together with their families, you know, play at home is learning how to wash the dishes with your family. And that's an equally valid model of childhood.

So what we need to do is expand our definition into thinking about what's culturally relevant for the children who are in our care, for the children who are in our community, and how can we make sure that what's meaningful to them is what we're bringing to the table with our ECE programs and our ECE policy.

Jasmine Moses (06:38)
I think that's something that's really interesting to think about when we do use the word universal in a lot of different ways. before the call started, we were talking a little bit about universal pre-K, right? And like all of these things that we think are assumptions, but don't show up in that way for everyone.

with that being said, one of the biggest ways that we see childhood being denied is through adultification, especially of black and brown children. So can you talk some about how you've seen this play out, how you've seen it through research play out in schools, perhaps the communities, wherever

Em (07:16)
Yeah, this is a huge issue and it's a really big part of sort of this preschool to prison pipeline that we're still seeing today that we haven't been able to really deal with in ECE is that black and brown children are.

wildly more likely to be harshly disciplined compared to their white peers. They're more likely to be seen as troublemakers. They're more likely to be suspended or expelled from their preschool programs. And even when they are exhibiting the same behaviors as their white peers, they're more likely to be seen as a problem.

you know, in and of themselves, whereas white peers exhibiting the same challenging behaviors are more likely to be seen as having a problem. And that's coming out of some really interesting research that I've been reading as well.

But yeah, I think there's so much work to be done in this area. And when we have different expectations of children, that really plays out in what we're offering. So some of the work that I've been doing recently is thinking about sort of what is the history of childcare for black children in the United States? And how has that really been shaped in these sort of stratified systems?

that we have and even tracing back from before the United States existed in North America, tracing all the way forwards to now, we can see these sort of separate paths and one of those paths is to sort of have moral salvation, know, or to solve problems, the problems of children existing. And one of those paths is to benefit children.

Jasmine Moses (08:35)
Mm-hmm.

Em (08:52)
And we can see very clearly in a lot of the setups of our pre-K, preschool systems that we have some systems that are really designed just to solve the problem of poor black children existing. Whereas wealthier, more affluent white children are more likely to be in ECE settings that provide them with this developmental enhancement goal. So it's still a very, very relevant problem today.

Jasmine Moses (09:17)
also want to make note to the listeners that sometimes when we hear kind of these facts and research based things, we think oh that's not happening in our community or that's not happening close to me. This is something that is really ingrained into our school society. It is happening all over, no matter where you are,

what areas you live in, I can guarantee there are some things at play that are happening in the school systems because that is what our systems have been built on, right, over time. So this is how they're carrying things out. lot of times when we hear these things, we like to think, that's too far away from me for me to impact it, do anything. But I want you to really listen in because this is definitely something that is impacting the children around you.

Em (10:03)
Absolutely, yeah. And one of the things I think that people should be looking at is this idea of universal pre-K, like we talked about. And I think a lot of us in the ECE field and beyond were hopeful that universal pre-K was really going to...

enhance some of the equity initiatives. But actually what we're finding is that it's really not. What we're finding is that universal pre-Ks are still extremely racially segregated. Universal pre-Ks are still just sort of exacerbating the same issues of poverty in the same neighborhoods. And so really what I'm finding in my work is that more of a recommendation for policy that maybe what we need is actually a reparation-based

funding strategy for universal pre-k rather than everyone gets the same, you know, we know there are some communities that have been historically marginalized that need more. And so how do we look at universal pre-k from an equity lens instead of an equality only lens?

Jasmine Moses (11:03)
You're speaking my language over here.

It's so tricky when we begin to try to throw money and other resources at a problem without looking deeper into the foundation that these things are built on. And I think that sometimes when people hear universal pre-kindergarten and...

programs that are modeled like it. They're like, this is great. Children deserve to go to school for free. This sounds amazing. But they're not actually thinking about the fact that putting children into these programs where they're understaffed, maybe under-resourced, you're going to continue to perpetuate those issues that you're trying to avoid. And also just throwing this out here that a

of times when people are making the decisions to do, you know, programs to support children, they're not actually leaning on the people who support children every day to help them design and build those programs. that's a whole nother conversation that I'm sure we could talk hours about. But I want to get into play because I know that you are an amazing person to listen to to talk about play and I love hearing you.

have conversations about it. I also love my daughter's new onesie that we got from your shop of play is her human right. Because it is, play is a child's human right. And so it's such a core part of childhood, but so many children, especially children of a global majority have that opportunity taken away from them. So what does it mean when play is treated as a privilege rather than a

Em (12:41)
Yeah, I think we see that every day in our ECE settings. see, you know, it's easy to sort of think about really big or egregious sort of...

times or places where children don't get to play. You know, we know that in active war zones, children are, you know, really restricted from their right to play, but children are also really restricted from their right to play when they're in schoolified ECE settings where they have to sit down at a little

table and complete a worksheet and then go to a small group reading lesson and then do all of these things. So it's harder sometimes to look into your own settings, into your own communities and see, we are also restricting children from their right to play. And that is also something that we need to address.

It's a universal problem, I think we can say, to think about how do children get to play? Who gets to decide? And I think that when we're thinking about children's rights to play, I think that who gets to decide question is really important because what it allows is for the children to take the lead in that conversation.

And it really helps us support culturally relevant practice if the children who are leading the way get to determine what play looks like and not adults from, you know, maybe a specific culture coming in and dictating what that play has to look like. If we're able to follow children's lead, then that can be a really meaningful way to make sure that they're not just getting to play, but they're getting to play in a way that makes sense for them.

Jasmine Moses (14:17)
And we know that children are often left out of these conversations too, right? Hence this podcast and the spaces that we're trying to create to make adults think about this and the ways that we can incorporate children's voice because they are needed to be a part of these decisions. Especially because why should we be able to make all of these decisions for them?

Em (14:23)
Yes.

Jasmine Moses (14:37)
they should be involved in being able to have these discussions too. So if we were to reimagine childhood as a right instead of a privilege, what in your opinion needs to change? What would that look like in practice?

Em (14:52)
think it really requires a full rework. I think we really have to start.

Jasmine Moses (14:58)
I agree.

Em (15:01)
I mean, like most things, we really have to start with ourselves, right, and evaluating what ideas do we hold? What sort of implicit biases do we hold about children, you know, and their abilities and their capabilities? And also, what do we sort of hold as these cultural values? You know, in the US, we know that like, independence is such a key cultural value. And that comes across in a lot of ways of our practices and ECE settings, you know, we want children to

feed themselves very early. We want them to be independent sleepers. You know, we really push these threads of independence. Whereas if we're really looking from a rights-driven sort of human-centric lens, we're focused more on interdependence. And when we're focused more on interdependence, then we're not seeing children as, you know, less capable than adults. We're seeing all humans as equally capable and in need of support.

Jasmine Moses (15:52)
Mm.

Em (15:57)
you know, it's that both and, that it's not unique to young children that they need support tying their shoes. It's not unique that any of us need a cuddle from a loved one. There are always that we are sort of interdependent and so that's a real cultural shift to be able to see children through that lens and also then see ourselves through that lens

Jasmine Moses (15:57)
Thank you.

So for then caregivers and community members, educators, whoever, concerned adults who are looking to make a change because children do deserve better, what's one thing that they can do to push back against the ways that childhood is unequally distributed?

Em (16:40)
I think one thing you can do like in your daily practice is to just consider Why why are you saying no? To this request from a child Because often we just say no like without even thinking about it

when we actually potentially could say yes. And so that can be a real way to center the child and to center their participation in their own life is by having to give that explanation to say, know, you want to splash in the puddles. Okay. do I have to say no? Because I don't want to do your laundry. Like, is that a good enough reason to restrict your rights? You know, and that's a consideration we can make in that moment.

Jasmine Moses (17:12)
You

Em (17:19)
But I think we can say, maybe in that moment we can say yes. Or, you know, people often give me the example when I talk about children's rights of, what if it's, freezing cold outside and it's a snowstorm and they don't want to wear their coat? Do they just not get to wear their coat because they don't want to? Of course they have to wear their coat, right? There's this dual role when we're in an interdependent society about there is this...

Jasmine Moses (17:33)
Mm.

Em (17:44)
this power dynamic at play between adults and children. And adults are ultimately responsible for the care of young children. And so of course there will be situations where our adult minds know that a child needs to wear a coat even if they don't want to. But it's thinking about giving ourselves that permission to say yes.

when we can, and then also giving children those reasons why we can't when we can't, because that happens as well. But you know, if your boss told you you couldn't go to a conference because there wasn't funding, they wouldn't just say no and walk away. You know, they would have a conversation with you and sort of make you understand their perspective, and you would have a chance to share your perspective. And so that's what we're asking with children as well, just that they're treated a little more human.

Jasmine Moses (18:33)
And I think it's hard if

weren't given maybe that opportunity as a young person or as a child to be able to have this autonomy over your own body, right? learning and unlearning and relearning is a cycle that we all have to find ourselves in as we continue to work out what is best practice for us so that we can be best to support children. But I know that like from a teaching perspective, I think it was a little easy

in

my classroom to say,

You have a lot of choices over things. Some things I have to say no to because I have to keep you safe. But you have all the choice, go ahead and make it. And then as a parent, right, it's like sometimes that inner struggle for me of like, I need to give you these choices. I need to let you be able to, you know, make this choice that feels best for your body. But I do know that like, especially speaking from like, different parents and friends that I have that it's sometimes difficult to find ourselves in those

situations where we have to find ways to let go and allow children to be able to make those decisions while still keeping that balance of keeping them safe and making sure that their needs are met. And so I know that for some people who might be listening, they're like, like.

Em (19:33)
Absolutely.

Jasmine Moses (19:49)
where do I start? think starting to really think about your why is important, right? When children ask us why, we're so quick to maybe give an answer and a repetitive answer but that is true. You need to really think through why you feel so connected to these practices that maybe you're implementing all the time or how we even got here. You need to start to think through those things in order to kind of unpack, unlearn, let go.

relearn. So I could listen to you talk about these things all day and I'm sure that the listeners could too because it's so important and it really opens your eyes to a lot of the decisions that adults make for children that they shouldn't or that they don't actually need to or that they have been making on their own without even including children in the decision-making process.

Em (20:16)
Yeah.

And I think just, you while you were talking the difference between being a teacher and being a parent, parenting is terrifying, right? we're so, as teachers, we're so invested in these kids, but we're typically invested in them for a year or two. You know, we don't have this lifetime investment. We don't always see those long-term.

Jasmine Moses (20:41)
Yeah, it is.

Yes. Yes.

Em (20:58)
gains and so while we know something is good for the child in this moment and it's good for them in the long run, we know we're not going to see that. Whereas with our own children, we're so terrified all day every day of messing them up that if we don't find ways for ourselves to sit with that, it can be really hard.

you know, to make choices for ourselves of how we want to parent rather than parenting in this reactive kind of way out of fear. I'm so glad you noted that, because I think that is really important for us to consider. Are we giving ourselves the space we need to parent from a place of focus and choice, or are we just parenting out of this fear-based reactive way, which

Jasmine Moses (21:24)
Mm-hmm.

Em (21:40)
our brains are wired to do that so much more quickly and easily than they are to really give ourselves the space and the grace, I think, to grow with our children.

Jasmine Moses (21:44)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and that takes a lot of rewiring. And so if you are in that space right now or concerned about where you might be in a few years just know lean into that, lean into the grace that you need. There are a lot of things that that me and my husband are trying new with our daughter. And it takes some rewiring, right? And it takes a lot of,

figuring out what works for her specifically and what might not. And it is a terrifying time because you are so invested in trying to make sure that they grow up to be like a empathetic human that is a global citizen that knows how to interact with people. especially parenting and caregiving.

during this time, I find it to be a really challenging thing. So just know, if that is you, you are not alone.

tons of resources out here that you can utilize to be able to start to rethink a lot of these practices. And Emily is a great follow with tons of resources that can help you to navigate a lot of those things. So where can people find you and the incredible work that you are doing?

Em (23:00)
Yeah, you can find me on Instagram at early edm or on my website early edm.com. And I try and keep those updated. Obviously, it depends. I'm working on my PhD. So my schedule is, as you know, crazy, crazy.

Jasmine Moses (23:12)
So busy. Very busy.

Em (23:18)
Yeah, but I'm really looking forward to that. also, let's see, I'm presenting at the Association for Early Learning Leaders this April in Orlando, and I'll also be presenting at Zero to Three's annual conference in October. So if you're going to any of those, please hit me up and let me know.

Jasmine Moses (23:25)
Yes, I...

I'm so proud of you. That is so awesome. if you have not followed yet after my gentle reminder at the beginning of this episode, please give Emily a follow. She is doing amazing, amazing work. So please stay connected and really think about the conversation that we had here today. this conversation that took place reminds us that protecting childhood

about fighting for systems that let children be children, right? If childhood is truly a right, then we have to be willing to dismantle these structures that we've built up over time that deny it to so many children. So thank you so much for listening in today. Please stay connected and we will see you soon.

Thank you, Emily.

Em (24:22)
Bye,

thanks so much, Jasmine.